The scale of the world is different here. Distances become impossible, the sky so expansive the Earth no longer fills it, the fence posts that line the highway fly by until they blur into a constant.

But no matter how long I keep driving, I never touch the horizon.

I heard the news today, oh boy. The sun has gone supernova and in six hours the earth is a cinder. Judy and I broke up, so I went to Henry’s Bar in the hopes of being some woman’s last chance. The one woman there was working her way through the guys. Her “dance card” was already filled. With time growing short, I’d give Judy another chance. She told me “Duke you should have gotten the message. I’m not going to waste my little time left with you. I’m in Jason’s bed making the best of the end of world.”

From Guest Contributor Doug Hawley

We left our gear on the shore and braved the jungle. Verdant, mossy plants, swollen fruits, normal snakes and spiders. All expected. But that smell. Like sulfur. Why? As earth and rocks piled up it permeated everything. It coated our hair and settled into the weave of our clothes. Warnings went unheeded. When we summited, it was too late. The crag gave way to a cavernous cleft. It glared a stony glare. Then the ground shuttered. Then it trembled. In those final fleeing moments, choked in smoke, death raining down, we understood the island’s ancient name: The Great Giant’s Buttocks.

From Guest Contributor Nicholas De Marino

That vibrant scarlet striking against the snow like a bell ringer striking a bell, reverberating through your body, taking up your entire being. She entices me with her beauty, but her thorns tell me not to touch. The wind sings and she dances with grace. Her perfume is like the smell of the green earth that reminds you you’re alive. I love her beauty, I love her fragrance, I love her grace. I would like to take her to my wife. If she could see this rose the way I see it, then she’d understand the way I see her.

From Guest Contributor Kyla Syner

Revelation 20 states that earth and heaven are burnt up. And? That the evil one is sent to earth to the lake of fire. Making earth in fact hell.

Meaning? Everything seems a bit off kilter or not going according to plan.

From Guest Contributor Clinton Siegle

Closed time curved loop? How to escape? Can one escape? The death of humanity? I doubt it. I wonder. Trapped in quantum confines, disbelief shattered when I queried the local AI about our galaxy’s age. Its cryptic answer: 50 million years. Puzzled, I questioned how Earth, at 4.5 billion years, coexisted with an arm merely 50 million years old. The AI faltered, unable to clarify. Seeking cosmic origins, I realized 50 million years aligned with the universe’s dawn. Reality morphed within this fragment, hinting at an enigmatic age defining both inception and present, blurring the edges of perception and time.

From Guest Contributor Clinton Siegle

She flips her glasses onto her hair where the shine is slippery. It falls back down to her nose, plastic lenses smudging. She goes for a drive wearing the blurry wedge and thinks she must be imagining the sight of two moons in the sky. One higher than the other, they supervise the intersection. “That was just Mars approaching Earth,” her husband says tartly. He’s quite the mansplainer but she knows a defunct theory when she hears one. She’s seen for herself that it’s possible for the sun to set while the moon rises on anything else, anything at all.

From Guest Contributor Cheryl Snell

Cheryl’s recent fiction has appeared in Gone Lawn, Necessary Fiction, Pure Slush, and elsewhere.

Hybrid kids of Earth? Munching on mermaids? Half-trout, half-human tumors to turbocharge fish growth? A few escape, and voilà, mermaids? Dining on Manitours? Half-cow, half-human tumors? Some flee, transforming Earth into fairyland? How ’bout orcs? Half-pig, half-human tumors? Orcs could settle scores when they flee. The weirdest? Chickenman. End days echo Noah’s. Bon appétit! The sad truth of mankind? Will humanity never learn? Eating yourself to death is humanity into Soylent Green all over again? Does humanity never listen and learn change your way before you become the meal of the day. For in the end. Live before being eaten.

From Guest Contributor Clinton Siegle

Déjà vu? Exactly when did Japan decide to kill an ocean? 2022? Or 2024? Or this coming Thursday? ‘Tis a question of the mind, it would seem. Meaning?

Each of those dates Japan had decided to let lose their nuclear waste into the ocean. The next question is Indian ocean or Pacific? Which will die? A third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed. To hope for salvation. And realize that governments of the world are fighting UFOs or God or gods? It makes reality kind of fictional today. Doesn’t it?

From Guest Contributor Clinton Siegle

A boy I knew killed a man. Lost his mind. Shaved his head. His face on the news was an open-mouthed scream, soundless. His eyes so round, searching. I whispered to the screen: please blink. I said it like ice in his mouth, like the way he’d look up at stars puncturing the still night sky, the cold air, too many angles of his body pushing out, knees and elbows and chin. I said it without hope. When this boy was mine, he danced and wide-smiled and kissed and laughed. His voice rang out, ethereal, hit the earth like rain.

From Guest Contributor Beth Mead